Law school is two years away. What can I do now to start preparing? My current gpa is right 3.7, but I don’t have a lot of club involvement and extra curricular activities. Political Science is my major.
Suggestions? What can I expect and what should I look for in a law school?
Thanks for any advice or help you can offer.
Get your reading comprehension up as high as you can. Law school is all about being able to understand the patterns in the stuff you’re assigned to read. You’re still are taught law by reading case law and extrapolating the principles from those decisions.
Don’t worry about specific types of classes to take as an undergrad, especially any “pre-law” or “law for layman” classes. Political science is a standard major for law school. Take classes with lots of reading, that make you write papers, and that challenge you to think. And that are fun, of course.
Some law schools are the traditional competitive type (i.e. one out of three of you won’t graduate). I avoided these. I really didn’t want to go to a school where classmates would actively try to sabatage me. I went with a school that believed that everyone they admitted had what it took to be a lawyer, so while there was still plenty of competition, it wasn’t quite so cutthroat as some stories I heard of other schools.
Other than that, pick a law school like you picked the undergraduate. If you know you’re interested in a particular area of law (say, environmental law or international law), then there are some specific schools that lead the pack, but all law schools teach to the bar exams, (which means a substantial number of the class offerings will be the same) so looking for a geographic location or size is perfectly acceptable.
Good luck. (Oh, I forgot to mention–I’m one of the crazy ones who loved law school, so if anyone tries to intimidate you with horror stories of how terrible it is, I’m happy to restore your spirits with my fond memories).
Philosophy.
The people from my graduating class who wound up clerking for Judges were all philosophy majors.
It’s anecdotal as all get out, it’s coming from a guy who no longer practices, and it’s also crossing an international boundary, but if you can’t filter out the signal to noise ratio of an internet post you’ll have very little chance of making it through your first year.
If you haven’t written the LSAT yet, you might want to start practicing. My class had philosophy students, biology students, people with doctorates and people with two years of undergrad; the only thing we had in common was LSAT scores.
Try not to write your LSAT on the same day as a 3 hour P.Sci. final. It’s not much fun.
The first year is different from anything you’ve done before, and it’s different from the rest of the experience. We started off with 115 people, ended the year with about 90, and graduated with about 87. If you can get through the first year, you should be okay. Well, up until the Bar exam, but one step at a time, yeah?
My only other advice is that you smoke if you don’t gossip naturally. Smokers have to congregate in certain areas, the group will include students, faculty, staff, and the occasional visiting expert, and it’s a wellspring of knowlege as to what’s really going on in the department.